Abstract:
This thesis is about the erveiros of Ver-o-Peso, from Belém do Pará, who dominate natural
medicine, in the tradition of the biointeraction of Amazonian herbs, in the agency of their
healing guides. During field trips, it was possible to see that herbalists live in the mediation of
agencies that directly affect their daily lives. The first is the exotic and “authentic” media
image of them and their products, which attracts a tourist demand eager to find, in erveiros
and their products, this image palatable to capitalism. The second is the hegemonic heritage
discourse, which emerges as a result of the rigging of regional heritage and tourism bodies.
The second is the hegemonic heritage discourse, which emerges as a result of the rigging of
regional heritage and tourism bodies. This hegemonic discourse operates in the perception of
tourists who visit the erveiros, who do not see them as part of the heritage in the Market, that
is, they only perceive the projection of the official heritage discourse of Ver-o-Peso, as a
“Postcard of the Belle Époque”. This thesis sought to understand the craft of erveiros through
their narratives, experiences and the practice of ancestral natural medicine, understood as
forms of resistance to the hegemonic heritage discourse, which disregards the value of herbal
knowledge as a local alterity. To uncover these mechanisms of resistance, the research
investigated the natural medicine of erveiros, going through their narratives in the process of
occupation of Ver-o-Peso, tracing four ancestral networks of herbalists that establish ties of
consideration and neighborhood over five. generations. The investigative process of this
Thesis was carried out using the ethnographic method, guided by the Latourian bias, in which
the endogenous meaning of the erveiros craft, as well as the dilemmas faced by them in Ver o-Peso, were traced through the connections between human actors and non-humans of herbs.
The research brought as its main contribution the proposal of “lived heritage”, embodied in
the he perception of heritage in Ver-o-Peso as a multiple category, which blurs the boundaries
of material and immaterial, differentiated from the perspective of the discursive order
hegemonic. Thus, it is expected to contribute to the line of anthropological heritage research,
which has been struggling to place the “others”, as alterity, at the center of debates
surrounding heritage, and not as a mere object of patrimonialization.
